Author: Alcock, Mary
Biography:
ALCOCK, Mary, formerly CUMBERLAND (1741-98: ODNB)
She was born on 26 May 1741 and baptised on 25 June at St Michael’s Cambridge, the youngest of daughter of Bishop Denison Cumberland (1705/6-1774) and his wife Joanna Bentley (1704/5-1775), daughter of Dr. Richard Bentley, Master of Trinity, Cambridge. She accompanied her parents to Ireland in 1763 when her father became Bishop of Clonfert. In Ireland she married an Irish-born Episcopalian minister, the Rev. Alexander Alcock (1744-1807), probably in Dublin in 1770, when her father made a marriage settlement (5 July 1770). The marriage did not last long. Her brother Richard Cumberland (q.v.) described Alcock as coming from a good family with fortune and preferment but suffering from “a violent nervous affection on his spirits” (Letters 69: 13 Nov. 1770). Less than a year later he wrote that he had “at length closed the uneasy transaction of my Sister’s marriage” (Letters 84). In his will of 1807, made in 1798, Alcock described himself as of Nicholstown, Kilkenny, and minister of the English Episcopal Chapel, St Paul’s, Aberdeen, married to Barbara Trail from the Isle of Sanday but with a former wife, Mary Cumberland, from whom there was an agreed “separation.” With Barbara Trail he had various children before Mary Alcock’s death in 1798, so it is not clear what happened or on what grounds he could have married Trail before 1798. There is no record for either marriage. On her parents’ deaths in quick succession 1774-1775, Alcock was left independently wealthy. Her brother recalled that she was “the best and most benevolent of human beings, [who] attended them in their last moments” (Memoirs [1806] 156). Her niece Joanna Hughes, her sister’s eldest daughter, noted how she became “the benefactress and protectress of a whole orphan family of dependent Nieces." She retired to Bath where she contributed to Lady’s Miller’s Batheaston poetry circle. She died on 28 May 1798 at her cousin’s house, Haselbeach Hall, nr. Market Harborough, Northants. Her niece edited her works after her death. Although she had been a shy and retiring figure, with poor health, who never actively published, her volume attracted over 650 subscribers, including Hannah More, Elizabeth Carter, William Cowper, and Samuel Rogers (qq.v.). Her poetry is fresh and varied (air-balloons, mobs) albeit alongside the usual sentimental concerns (debtors, chimney-sweeps). (ODNB 14 Feb. 2021; CCEd; Alcock, Poems [1799] iii-vii; GM June 1798, 539; Caledonian Mercury 26 Feb. 1807; Richard Cumberland, Memoirs [1806]; Richard Cumberland, Letters [1988]) AA
Other Names:
- Mrs. Mary Alcock