Читать книгу The Remarkable Lushington Family - David Taylor - Страница 14
ОглавлениеStephen Lushington was born on 14 January, 1782, and baptized at the parish church of St. Mary, Marylebone, on 6 March the same year. Two portraits survive from his childhood. A charming oval watercolor by John Downman shows him seated on his mother’s lap and, a few years later, Richard Cosway painted him dressed in a blue coat with large silver buttons, cream waistcoat, and shirt with wide falling collar. His hair is curled and worn long (figures 1 and 2). Lushington retained his girlish looks into his adolescence and, aged eighteen, attending a fancy-dress ball dressed as a lady, he received no less than three offers of marriage.1
What little is known of Lushington’s formative years comes from some notes compiled by one of his grandchildren.2 He went to Eton at the tender age of six accompanied by his nurse but was removed from the school at the age of eleven for fighting.3 After this he was tutored privately to prepare him for university and then, aged fifteen, he went up to Christ Church, Oxford.
Like many other young undergraduates, before and since, Lushington enjoyed an active social and recreational life at the university. He became vice president of the exclusive Bullington Club, a sporting club dedicated to cricket and horse-racing, whose rowdy dinners gradually became its principal activity and were notorious for its members’ riotous behavior. He was also a keen sportsman and excelled at cricket making several appearances in major matches in 1799, usually playing for Surrey.4 At university, Lushington took degrees in civil law. He graduated with a BA in 1802, followed by an MA in 1806, BCL in 1807, and a DCL in 1808.
One of Stephen’s contemporaries, both at Eton and Christ Church, was Edward Harbord, son of Lord Suffield. The two became close friends, and Suffield later opened the way for Lushington’s parliamentary career. In 1801, Lushington was elected as a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, a position he held until 1821 when he resigned on marriage as was then required. He presented the college with two silver dishes with an amusing inscription of how he had fallen, “alas, into matrimony: farewell and be warned.”
The future of Lushington’s older brother Henry, who was heir to the title and fortune, was guided entirely by his father, whereas Stephen’s education and career were left largely to his mother. After her son left university, Lady Lushington wrote to Lord Melville hoping to get her son a government appointment. She explained how “for many years back his head has run upon nothing but politics.”5 Despite meeting with Melville, Lady Lushington was unsuccessful in furthering her son’s prospects. Stephen Lushington’s son, Vernon, writing in 1855, stated that his father had been offered an undersecretaryship of state, “but some noble lord in the Cabinet objected to it, & my father was not appointed; & I often heard him congratulate himself on his rejection, for ‘Perhaps I should have ended my days long ago in some miserable colony or other, & then where wd. you have been, my children.’”6
In 1806, Lushington was called to the bar of the Inner Temple and, later that year, he entered Parliament as Member for Great Yarmouth. An American visitor to England at this time described him as:
of the middling size, rather slender in person, with a pensive and almost melancholy expression of countenance. The tones of his voice, too, are solemn, melodious and pathetic . . . The powers of Dr L. as an orator are certainly of no common stamp.7
Lushington’s parliamentary and legal careers will be considered later. For the time being, we turn to a major turning point in his domestic life, his marriage in 1821 to Sarah Grace Carr, a daughter of the Newcastle lawyer Thomas William Carr.
The Carrs of Hampstead
The Carrs were an old Northumberland family who, like the Lushingtons, could trace their ancestry back to the early fifteenth century.8 Thomas William Carr was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1770 where his father, also named Thomas, had settled earlier in the century to take up the lucrative post of customs collector. He was the son of William Carr who lived at of Eshott Hall, Northumberland, a fine Palladian style house which stands close to the beautiful Northumberland coast.
Thomas senior married four times and on his father’s death, he inherited Eshott and returned there from America with Thomas William in 1772. Thomas was reckless with the family finances and nearly obliterated their wealth and landholdings after borrowing heavily. In 1786, he left Eshott Hall, and it was sold out of the family.9 Thomas William was named as his father’s heir and sent to study law at Edinburgh University. The Carr family eventually moved to Newcastle where they became close friends of the Hollands, who were ancestors of the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell.10
In 1794, Thomas William married Frances Morton, who was also from an old Northumberland family (figure 3). In 1801, he was called to the bar. Four years later, Thomas Carr was appointed Solicitor to the Excise, the government department dealing revenue chargeable on the manufacture or sale of liquor and tobacco. His distance from London and his reluctance to spend too much time away from home, led him to move his family south in 1807. They chose the country rather than the city and settled in Hampstead, then a rural village on the outskirts of London, surrounded by fields.11
By the early eighteenth century, Hampstead had become a fashionable spa with wells and an assembly room. When the Carrs settled there, the village was home to many well-to-do merchants and professional men as well as a number of artists and writers. It was ideal for Carr who, although a lawyer by profession, at home was a devotee of music and the arts and on close terms with several leading artists and designers of the day including Arthur Devis, Thomas Hope and Robert Smirke. Carr’s circle of friends also included the wealthy banker and abolitionist Samuel Hoare Jr., and the poets William Wordsworth and Robert Southey.12 A Hampstead neighbor was the Scottish author and poet Joanna Baillie, who extolled the virtues of the place in her verse:
It is a goodly sight through the clear air,
From Hampstead’s heathy height to see at once
England’s vast capital in fair expanse.
It was Hampstead’s “clear air” and “heathy height” that drew Thomas Carr to the place as he explained to Wordsworth, “I have reason to love it [Hampstead] with gratitude for I believe it saved my Life.” Wordsworth later recorded that Carr had confided in him,
that in consequence of severe application to business his health had entirely failed, a complaint having been generated the seat of which he thought was in his heart, and I came here, said he, as I believed to die,—But relaxation from business and pure air, by little and little restored me, and I am now excellently well and my children 8 in number healthy and flourishing. The seat of his disease proved to be the Liver; he is now quite well and blooming, but in the lines of his face are traces rather of sickness than years. When I last saw him about ten years ago he was the most youthful and healthful looking Man of my acquaintance.13
The Carrs lived at “Maryon Hall,” an impressive, late eighteenth-century, house, in an area known as Frognal.14 It was conveniently close to the center of the village and the parish church. Wordsworth described it as follows:
most charmingly situated . . . which though not many yards from the public road sees nothing of it, but looks down the hill sprinkled with trees over a scenicly [sic] rich woody Country, like one of our uncut forests, towards the smoke of London and upon the Kentish and Surrey hills far beyond.15
Sarah Grace was the first of Thomas and Frances’s eight children. She had two sisters both of whom married well. Isabella married Sir Culling Eardley Smith, a wealthy religious campaigner and a founder of the Evangelical Alliance, and Laura married Robert Monsey Rolfe, Baron Cranworth who became Lord Chancellor. The Cranworths lived in Kent where their neighbor was Charles Darwin. The other girls—Frances Rebecca and Anna Margaret—never married. There were three sons, Andrew Morton, Thomas William and William Ogle. Andrew Morton and William both followed their father into the law.16 Morton later moved to Edinburgh where he became Solicitor to the Excise, and William, who entered the diplomatic service, traveled with his sister Anna Margaret to Ceylon where he became King’s Advocate and later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.17 Thomas William junior took holy orders and became an Anglican priest.
A Literary Coterie
The Carrs soon established themselves at the center of a lively literary coterie in Hampstead which included Joanna Baillie and her sister Agnes. Baillie knew Byron and Keats and her work was greatly admired by Sir Walter Scott. The Baillie sisters were considered “sociable, hospitable, and much admired and visited, being on intimate terms of friendship with many eminent figures in the arts and sciences.”18 Joanna wrote to Walter Scott, “We have a most agreeable neighbour here, a great favourite of my Sisters & mine . . . Mr Carr, a learned Barrister.”19 Together, the Baillies and the Carrs made the middle-class society in Hampstead “very agreeable.”20 Scott himself dined with the Carrs on at least one occasion in May 1815.21
Another literary lion, the poet and essayist Anna Letitia Barbauld, moved to Hampstead with her husband, the Reverend Rochemont Barbauld, in 1785.22 She wrote several powerful, controversial, political tracts praising the French Revolution; criticizing Parliament in its failure to abolish slavery and championing the rights of Dissenters from the Church of England.23 At one time, she had sought to mentor the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but he later turned against her. Barbauld was befriended by Joanna Baillie who almost certainly introduced her to the Carrs, and it was they she probably had in mind when, noticing the surplus of young women in Hampstead, she wrote, “I pity the young ladies of Hampstead . . . there are several very agreeable ones. One gentleman in particular has five tall marriageable daughters, and not a single young man is to be seen in the place.”24 Barbauld became a regular visitor at “Maryon Hall” and wrote verses for the Carr children and took part in their family theatricals.25
It was Barbauld who introduced Thomas Carr to the radical journalist, political philosopher and novelist, William Godwin, husband of the pioneering feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft. Their daughter Mary married Percy Bysshe Shelley and was the author of Frankenstein.26 Another regular visitor at “Maryon Hall” was the lawyer and diarist, Henry Crabb Robinson, who considered Carr to be a clever and “very sensible man whose company I like.” Robinson later recalled dining with the Carrs when fellow guests were Wordsworth and the chemist, inventor and scientist, Sir Humphrey Davy and his wife.27
Joanna Baillie also introduced the Carrs to the Irish novelist and educationalist Maria Edgeworth. She was the daughter of Richard Lovell Edgeworth of County Longford, the inventor and educational theorist who was viewed wth suspicion in some circles as a religious heretic. Maria was one of an incredible number of twenty-two children. Maria was a very popular author in her time and was greatly influential in the development of the English novel. She is best remembered for Castle Rackrent, a novel which satirizes Anglo-Irish landlords and their overall mismanagement of their estates at a time when the English and Irish parliaments were working toward formalizing their union through the Acts of Union.
In 1819 Maria, together with her sisters Fanny and Honora, were invited to stay at “Maryon Hall.” Maria, who had not enjoyed a happy childhood due to her father’s neglect, envied what she saw and wrote home to her own mother:
Mrs Carr is the most kind hearted motherly creature I have seen since I came to England. How fortunate we were to come here just at the moment we did. We have a delightful airy bedchamber with cheerful bow window—large bed for Fanny and me—a room adjoining for Honora and a little dressing room—with a double and tiny anteroom that shuts out all noise. As Mrs Carr says I am sure these 3 rooms were intended from the Creation for the 3 Edgeworths they fit and suit them so exactly.
Mr Carr! Oh mother I almost envy these dear good girls the happiness of the affection they have for their father. If you could see them all from the eldest to the youngest running to the gate to meet him as he rides home on his white horse! He is one of the very happiest men I ever saw—of the happiest temper—working hard all day usefully and honourably and coming home every evening to such a happy cultivated united family. When he sits down to dinner in the midst of his children he says he throws aside every care for the remainder of the day and enjoys himself. He is passionately fond of drawing and music and one daughter draws admirably and another plays and sings admirably—and all their accomplishments are for him and for their own family. They are really happy people. Certainly Fanny has the advantage of seeing a greater variety of the insides of families of all ranks than could have been expected—even by my sanguine imagination.28
The daughter noted by Edgeworth for her artistic talent was Sarah Grace, the future wife of Stephen Lushington.29 Maria later wrote to Sarah:
Your drawings are beautiful—but they are infinitely more valuable to me than drawings however excellent could be as proof of your kind dispositions towards me,—shall I say at once, of your liking me. I assure, my dear Miss Carr, this liking is mutual, and whenever we come to England again we shall with great eagerness avail ourselves of Mr and Mrs Carr’s cordial invitation and endeavour to cultivate the society of a family who have shown ours so much attention, and whom we feel so many reasons for valuing.30
Strongly influenced by her father’s views, Maria corresponded with Sarah on matters of education, an area of common interest between the Carr and, later, the Lushington families. Maria invited Sarah and her fiancée to visit her brother Lovell’s school in Ireland and she later wrote to her, “Since you and Dr Lushington saw and approved of the beginning, much more has been effected, and the improvement, intellectual and moral, are really astonishing.”31 This interest in progressive education was pursued some years later when two of Sarah’s daughters were involved in an experimental school which was set up under the supervision of Lady Byron.
Enter Lady Byron
Annabella Millbanke, the future Lady Byron, had been on friendly terms with the Carr family from before they moved to Hampstead. Her family were also from Northumberland and knew the Carrs. In a letter to Sarah Carr written from Alnwick in August 1807, she referred to an excursion she had made with Sarah and her father. Annabella, like Maria Edgeworth also thought highly of Sarah’s artistic talent.
In January 1815, Annabella married George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron. Their time together as husband and wife was both short and stormy, and the marriage was doomed from the start due to Byron’s infidelity and debt. Barely eleven months after her marriage Annabella gave birth to a daughter, Augusta Ada (the future Lady Lovelace). In January 1816, concerned at her husband’s increasingly bad behavior, Lady Byron took her daughter to her parents in Leicestershire. She never returned to her husband. Later that month, Lady Byron’s mother sought advice on her daughter’s behalf from two distinguished lawyer friends. They advised her to consult a young rising star in the legal profession named Stephen Lushington.
Lady Byron considered taking refuge in the possibility that her husband was mad and had earlier consulted Dr. Matthew Baillie, brother of Joanna Baillie, concerning Lord Byron's mental state. Following an initial consultation with Lady Byron’s mother, Lushington agreed to take on what would prove to be his most celebrated case.32 In February of that year, Lushington had his first meeting with Lady Byron. Her suspicions of incest him Lushington to believe that reconciliation was impossible and, as a result, he urged her to immediately cease all communication with her husband. He advised her to bring the case to trial but she informed him that she wished for a private settlement. Thus began the process of their legal separation and, on October 12, 1816, Lady Byron wrote from Kirkby Mallory, her family home:
My zealous & disinterested friend Dr Lushington is here now on a visit of relaxation from his professional labours, and in the little conversation I have had with him about my prospects, he seems thoroughly convinced that Lord B will not return, and that such an event is only held out by his friends from prudential motives.33
In 1816, Lady Byron moved to Hampstead. She had met Joanna Baillie some four years earlier and often visited her and her sister in the village. She was also already a regular visitor at “Maryon Hall,” often staying there for several days. Lady Byron eventually took a furnished house in the village for herself and Augusta Ada.34 After moving to Hampstead, she wrote how Mrs Carr had “been particularly kind in supplying my wants as to the household” and, once settled in her new home, she began to reciprocate the generosity shown to her by holding dinner parties at which distinguished visitors would mix with her neighbors. It was probably at one of these functions that Sarah Carr and Stephen Lushington met for the first time.
The fresh air of rural Hampstead and walks in the open fields around her new home greatly benefitted her young daughter and soon Lady Byron was able to report “Ada grown very intelligent—singing—dancing—conversing. She may be made a good & happy person, I think, without great difficulty from her present amiable disposition”35 As Ada grew in years her mother enlisted the help of some close friends to help mentor and guide the young girl who was proving a little too unruly at times. According to a later close confidant of Ada, these three ladies were constantly with Lady Byron who was entirely led by them. They were accused of interfering in the most unjustifiable manner between mother and daughter. Ada called them the three Furies after the mythological Greek deities. They were Selina Doyle (an old childhood friend from Yorkshire), Mary Montgomery of Blessingbourne, N.I. (whose brother had been an unsuccessful suitor of Lady Byron) and Frances Carr (Sarah’s sister). All three continued to figure in Ada’s life as she grew into maturity.
In 1817, to escape from the tittle-tattle of London society, Lady Byron left for the north of England. She required a suitable traveling companion for this adventure and, after some discussion with the Carrs, it was agreed that the young Sarah, despite a weakness of constitution, would join her.36 Lady Byron spent four nights at the Carr’s home before setting off with Sarah for Yorkshire from where she planned to journey on to the Lake District. However, no sooner had Sarah left Hampstead than she was overcome with homesickness. She confided in her Journal:
The weather was intensely hot as we left Frognall & excepting in the pleasant conversations and open kindness of my friend, I found little in the day’ Journey to interest, or to divert my thoughts that constantly turned back with regret to those I left behind—Indeed I never remember to have begun a journey with less buoyancy of hopes.37
During the journey, Lady Byron unburdened herself to her young companion. Sarah wrote to her mother, “I had a good deal further conversation with Lady Byron today as to the state of her feelings on one great subject.”38 Baillie later wrote to her friend Anne Millar:
We lost our sweet neighbour Lady Byron about a fortnight ago; and she has taken Miss Carr with her, intending to travel to the Lakes in quest of health which I wish she may find. Her stomach & nerves are in a bad state & she sleeps ill, evets [sic] not to be wondered at in her situation.39
In the event, it was Sarah’s health that became a cause for concern and letters on the subject flew between Hampstead and Derbyshire. In July, Joanna Baillie called on the Carrs with a letter she had received from Lady Byron concerning Sarah. The letter's content was shared with an anxious mother who expressed the hope that her daughter would soon get stronger and that she would not “add to your anxiety which would be defeating the end of your travelling.” Furthermore, although she did not wish that Sarah should return earlier than was originally planned, if she did not recover to full health, Mrs Carr would send her son to fetch his sister home.40 Sarah continued with Lady Byron but, by August, Lady Byron decided to travel on to Scotland alone. Baillie wrote to her encouraging her to visit Sir Walter Scott on this next stage of her journey and then added:
I am glad to hear such favourable accounts of our poor Sarah. I trust she will by & by get entirely free of her complaint. It has been very hard upon her affectionate nature not to have been so long with you nor so useful to you as she wished. She mentions in her letters to her Friends here your kindness of attention to her in the most grateful & gratifying terms.41
A year after her troubled excursion Sarah visited Maria Edgeworth and gave her a full account of the trip which Maria then relayed to her mother:
Miss Carr dined here; we like her very much. She is a particular friend of Lady Byron’s—travelled with her in England the year Lord Byron left her—went with her to the very place where Lady Byron had been married. She gave us a most touching account of Lady Byron’s conduct—of her struggles to repress her feelings—of the absurd conclusion some people drew from her calm manner and composed countenance that she did not feel. Remember that I told you of Lady Byron’s coming as if in her sleep into Miss Carr’s room that night in the dead of night and sitting on the side of her bed—wishing to be able to cry. I cannot write it all—but I am sure I shall remember to tell it you. It made too great an impression ever to be forgotten. Miss Carr is a most engaging unaffected truly feeling young woman and she is extremely well informed and accomplished. She was so good at my request to let her servant bring with her this evening two books large as Allen’s Town print-books of her drawings—sketches she had made in 1816 on a tour through Germany Swisserland [sic] and Italy . . . Miss Carr as we turned them over gave most entertaining notes explanatory—telling us anecdotes of places and people and manners.42
Shortly after this, Stephen Lushington proposed marriage to Sarah Carr.
NOTES
1. Walter Sidney Scott (ed.) Letters of Maria Edgeworth and Anna Letitia Barbauld Selected from the Lushington Papers (Golden Cockrel Press, 1953), p. 9.
2. Recollections of Sir Stephen Lushington, 1st baronet, and Dr Stephen Lushington.
3. Scott, Letters of Maria Edgeworth and Anna Letitia Barbauld Selected from the Lushington Papers, p. 10.
4. Lillywhite's Scores and Biographies of Celebrated Cricketers, Volume 1 (1744–1826) (Kent & Co., 1862).
5. Hester Lushington to Lord Melville, 3 May 1804. SHC7854/1/1/1a-b.
6. Vernon Lushington to Richard Monkton Milnes (later Lord Houghton), Houghton Papers, Trinity College, Cambridge, 15/113.
7. Nathaniel S. Weaton, A.M., A Journal of a Residence During Several Months in London; Including Excursions Through Various Parts of England; And A Short Tour in France and Scotland In the Years 1823 And 1824 (H. & F.J. Huntington, 1830).
8. A detailed history of the Eshott estate and the Carr family is in the Newcastle Courant, 21 and 28 September 1877.
9. The Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, 26 April 1785 carried an announcement of the sale of Eshott estate which was described as “A Capital and very Valuable Freehold Estate . . . of One Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty Acres”. The estate also contained “a very Excellent Current Colliery, working to great advantage.”
10. In a letter to Catherine Winkworth dated 23 July 1862, Elizabeth Gaskell wrote “Mr V[ernon] L[ushington] came up, & introduced me to his aunt (his mother died in 1837). His Aunt, Miss Carr, well known to my Aunts, in other days, when Hollands & Carrs were near neighbours.” J.A.V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (eds.) The Letters of Mrs Gaskell (Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 928. For more on Gaskell and the Carrs, see John Chapple, Elizabeth Gaskell. The Early Years (Manchester University Press, 1997).
11. On 6 April 1812 Joanna Baillie wrote to (Sir) Walter Scott, “We have a most agreeable neighbour here, a great favourite of my sisters & mine, and being a Borderer, than English one, claiming (tho’ unknown) some little favour from you: Mr Carr, a learned Barrister, at the head of the excise office.” J.B. Slagle (ed.) The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999).
12. On 9 February 1797, Robert Southey recorded a meeting “At the Chapter Coffee House to which I accompanied Carr and Barbauld.” Southey’s Common-Place Book: Fourth Series, ed. J.W. Warteer (Reeves and Turner, 1876), p. 39. In a letter to Mary Baker in 1811 Southey wrote, “Mrs Carr is a clever woman. She knows me but very little—I once dined at her house,—some fourteen or fifteen years ago, & have met once or twice since.” Ian Packer and Lynda Pratt (eds.) The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, Part Four: 1810–1815. Romantic Circles website.
13. William Wordsworth to Mary Wordsworth, 30 May 1812, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Alan G. Hill (ed.) The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Volume VII, The Later Years, Part IV 1840–1853 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1988).
14. I am most grateful to Christopher Wade, an authority on Hampstead’s history, for helping me locate the residences of the Carrs and their friends. His book The Streets of Hampstead, published by the Camden History Society (Second Edition, 1972), has proved immensely helpful.
15. William Wordsworth to Mary Wordsworth, 20 May 1812, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth.
16. Morton Carr became Solicitor to the Excise and moved to Edinburgh. Joanna Baillie wrote to Sir Walter Scott, “Mr Carr’s eldst (sic) Son, Morton Carr, who has just left his Father’s pleasant house & family to be a lonely resident in the good Town of Edinr. as Solicitor for the Excise of Scotland . . . he is a young man of most amiable manner & character & one of my young favourites, I know you will be inclined to speak kindly to him & shew him countenance wherever you may meet him. He is with all his other good qualities a modest man, and will not presume upon it.” Joanna Baillie to (Sir) Walter Scott, date uncertain, The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie, Vol. 1.
17. “[Mrs Carr’s] youngest son William is appointed Attorney General for the Isle of Ceylon; an advantageous & honourable appointment for a young man, but it will take him far away and he was a great comfort to his Mother & Sisters at home.” Joanna Baillie to Anne Elliott, 13 November 1832. The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie, Vol. 1. In 1841, Baillie wrote to the wife of Sir Humphrey Davy that she had seen Anna Carr who had “become a very agreeable, intelligent companion, tho’ changes of time and the variety of scenes she has seen in Italy & in Ceylon have not been lost on her observing mind, and her ready talent for drawing whatever she see, country, plants, beast or body, provides here with good illustrations for her story.”
18. Christine Colvin (ed.) Maria Edgeworth’s Letters from England 1813–14 (Oxford University Press, 1971).
19. Joanna Baillie to Sir Walter Scott, 6th April 1812. The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie, Vol. 1.
20. Christina Colvin (ed.) Maria Edgeworth’ Letters from England 1813–14, (Oxford University Press 1971), p. xxii.
21. Lucy Aikin recalled dining with the Carrs in May 1815 to meet Scott. See Lady Seymour (ed.) The “Pope” of Holland House: Selections from the Correspondence of John Wishaw and his Friends, 1813–40 (T.F. Unwin, 1906), p. 30.
22. T.W. Carr was the executor of Rochemont Barbauld’s will.
23. For more on Anna Barbauld and Joanna Baillie see In Her Hand. Letters of Romantic-Era British Women Writers in New Zealand Collections, Otago Students of Letters (Department of English, University of Otago, New Zealand, 2013).
24. Anna Letitia Barbauld to John Aikin, October 1786. Quoted in William McCarthy, Anna Letitia Barbauld. Voice of the Enlightenment (The John Hopkins University Press, 2008).
25. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Prologue to a Drama, Performed by a Family Party on the Anniversary of Mr. and Mrs. C[arr]’s Marriage.
26. Another close friend of the Carrs (and ultimately the Lushingtons) living in Hampstead at this time was the Scottish lawyer Sir John Richardson (1780–1864). Richardson moved in literary society in London and Scotland and was a friend of Walter Scott. In 1821, he introduced the poet George Crabbe to Thomas Campbell at Joanna Baillie’s Hampstead home. Richardson was also an old friend of Thomas Carlyle. In 1830, on the recommendation of Scott, Richardson purchased the estate of Kirklands in Roxburghshire where he eventually retired and died. Richardson’s daughters became close friends and correspondents of Stephen’s son Vernon during his university years.
27. Thomas Sadler (ed.) Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, Barrister-at-law, F.S.A. (Macmillan and Co, London, 1869), Vol. I, p. 390.
28. Maria Edgeworth to her Mother, 4 April, 1819. Maria Edgeworth, Letters From England.
29. Several of Sarah Carr’s drawings, together with others by her sister Anna Margaret, are now in the Carr family collection of travel sketches, scrapbooks, and genealogical material, 1699–1981, Yale Centre for British Art.
30. Maria Edgeworth to Sarah Carr, October 26, 1818. Scott, Letters of Maria Edgeworth and Anna Letitia Barbauld selected from the Lushington Papers, p. 18.
31. Ibid., No date.
32. Stephen Lushington first met with Lady Byron on 22 February, 1816.
33. Quoted in Malcolm Elwin, Lord Byron’s Family. Annabella, Ada and Augusta, 1816–1824 (John Murray, 1975), p. 106.
34. Ibid., p. 138.
35. Lovelace Byron papers. Bodleian Library.
36. Lady Byron had originally planned to take Mary Eden, a sister of Lord Auckland, who, as George Eden, had been her first rejected suitor before she met Byron. Annabella wrote to her mother of her plans for this tour, “I have pretty nearly formed my plans, I hope in the most eligible manner. At the end of the month I shall spend a few days with Lady Ormonde & Mrs Carr. Then I shall make a short visit to the G[eorge] Byron’s in Essex, where they have taken a house, and thence to Kirkby with a companion de voyage whom I hope you will think very desirable—not Miss Eden, but this is a long story, and I had rather talk about than write.” Quoted in Lord Byron’s Family, p. 152.
37. Journal of Sarah Grace Carr. June 20, 1817. Lovelace Byron 446 Item 1. Bodleian Library.
38. Ibid.
39. Joanna Baillie to Anne Millar, June 30, 1817. The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie.
40. Lovelace Byron 62 ff. 53–54. Bodleian Library.
41. Ibid., ff. 55–56.
42. Maria Edgeworth to her mother, October 15, 1818. Maria Edgeworth. Letters from England, 1813–1844.
