Author: Bryan, Mary
Biography:
BRYAN, Mary, formerly LANGDON, later BEDINGFIELD (1780-1838: ancestry.co.uk)
She was born on 15 June 1780 at North Petherton, near Taunton, Somerset, the eldest daughter of Edmund Langdon and his wife Mary Ballam. Her siblings Anna, Julia, and John Ballam appear in Sonnets and Metrical Tales (1815). (Julia died in 1804 and is the subject of memorial poems.) Mary Langdon married Edward Bryan (1779-1814) on 30 May 1804 at St. Cuthbert’s, Wells, Somerset. In or about 1809, he set up as a printer and stationer in the High Street, Bristol. From 1812 to 1814, the firm operated from the City Printing office, 52 Corn Street and 19 Clarence Place. The firm became known as Mary Bryan & Co. from 1815 to 1823. He died insolvent in 1814 and was buried on 6 Apr. 1814 at the Baptist Burying-Ground, Bristol. Her father took over the running of the firm but it was never a success. She dedicated Sonnets and Metrical Tales to James Bedingfield (1788-1860), a surgeon and apothecary at Bristol Infirmary and author of A Compendium of Medical Practice (1816), citing her husband’s dying plea that he take care of her and the six children. They married secretly (his family disapproved) on 22 Dec. 1818 at St. Clement Danes, Westminster, and went to live in Stowmarket, Suffolk, where he had a practice. In 1818 she appealed to Walter Scott for help and complained that the people of Bristol would “suffer twenty Chattertons to perish in their streets” (Ragaz). In the course of ten letters (1818-1827) that she wrote to him before the publication of her novel Longhollow in 1829, she details her poverty, ill-health, and lack of literary success. She had earlier written to Wordsworth, probably in 1815; he advised against a career in poetry because only Scott (who lacked poetic feeling) and Byron (perverted) “succeeded in making money by their poetry” (Critical Heritage). She died on 29 Sept. 1838 at Stowmarket, aged 58. James Bedingfield remarried the following year. (ancestry.co.uk 22 Feb. 2021; Orlando; Suffolk Chronicle 23 May 1818, 17 July 1819; Ipswich Journal 6 Oct. 1838, 5 May 1860; Sharon Ragaz, "Writing to Sir Walter: The Letters of Mary Bedingfield," Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic Text 7 [2001]; Wordsworth:The Critical Heritage, ed. Robert Woof [2001] 1: 829-31) AA
Other Names:
- Mrs. Bryan