Author: Blackett, Mary Dawes
Biography:
BLACKETT, Mary Dawes (d 1792: ancestry.co.uk)
The one certain biographical fact is the date of her burial at St. Mary’s, Lambeth: 8 Aug. 1792. Her birth surname was likely Dawes; her The Monitress, or the Oeconomy of Female Life, in a Series of Letters from M. D. Blackett to her Daughter (1791) mentions Arthur Smithson Dawes, a solicitor, as a relation. By 1791 she was probably a widow; The Monitress is dedicated to friends who patronised her “in the Hour of Adversity.” She seems to have been well-connected and she had a brother who was serving under Admiral Sir Hyde Parker when his ship was lost at sea off the coast of Brazil in 1782. Blackett’s daughter was named Catharine but no genealogical records have been located for her; that she was educated as a Catholic indicates the religion of her father (Mary Blackett was a Protestant). Blackett dedicated two of her works to the artist Richard Cosway: Suicide (1789) and “Ode to Poetry,” a poem published in the European Magazine in Sept. 1791. Her letter “On Popular Superstitions” was printed in both the European Magazine and Walker’s Hibernian Magazine in 1790; it mentions her father as having commanded several ships for the merchant navy in his youth. The only other sighting of her is a poem, “To Miss. H. Falconar,” printed in Harriet and Maria Falconar’s (qq.v.) Poetic Laurels of 1791. (ancestry.co.uk 26 Aug. 2023; ODNB [for Hyde Parker and Richard Cosway] 26 Aug. 2023)
Other Names:
- M. Blackett