Author: Cartwright, Frances Dorothy
Biography:
CARTWRIGHT, Frances Dorothy (1783-1863: ancestry.co.uk)
Boase, DNB, ODNB, and Family Trees on Ancestry give her date of birth as 28 Oct. 1780 without supporting documentation. The Censuses listed her in 1841 as aged 60 (birth date c. 1781), 1851 as 67 (1784) and 1861 as 78 (1783). The later Censuses are often more accurate because not subject to rounding. However, the register at Goadby Marwood, Leicestershire, where her father was Rector, clearly states that she was born on 28 Oct. 1783 and baptised on 15 May 1784, the daughter of Rev. Edmund Cartwright and his wife Alice [Whitaker]. They had married 15 Dec. 1772 at Doncaster, Yorkshire. Edmund Cartwright (q.v.) achieved some fame as an inventor of textile machinery; her uncle, Major John Cartwright (1740-1824) was a radical and reformer; her sister Elizabeth Penrose Cartwright (1780-1837) wrote A History of England (1823); and another sister, Mary Cartwright (1777-1858) wrote a biography of their father, A Memoir of the Life, Writings and Mechanical Inventions of Edmund Cartwright (1843). After her mother’s death in 1785, Frances Dorothy was adopted by her uncle Major Cartwright and his wife Ann. She would later write a eulogistic biography, The Life and Correspondence of Major Cartwright (1826). Educated at a school in Richmond, Surrey, she developed an early taste for poetry but her only volume of verse was Poems, Chiefly Devotional which contains versions of the Psalms, poems on the Gospels, and three poems on Major Cartwright. In the 1820s, she met Spanish exiles at her uncle’s house and admired the poetry of Rafael del Riego y Nunez (1784-1823); she translated several of his poems in Obras Postumas poeticas (1844). (Riego was also admired by another woman poet, Laura Sophia Temple, q.v.). After the deaths of her father (1824) and uncle (1823), she lived with various relatives in Worthing, Sussex, Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, Littleham, and Devon, and by 1861 was a boarder in Hove. She died on 12 Jan. 1863 at 12 Medina Villas, Cliftonville, Hove, Brighton, leaving an estate of under £4000. The death notices in the London newspapers (MA, MH, MP, SJC, LES) gave her age at death as 83 and were probably the source of the error carried through to Boase, DNB, and ODNB. Her death certificate gave her correct age. (ODNB [father and uncle] 2 Sept. 2022; ancestry.co.uk 2 Sept. 2022; findmypast.co.uk; Stamford Mercury 1 Jan. 1864; GRO death cert.) AA