Author: Chalmers, Margaret
Biography:
CHALMERS, Margaret (1758-1827: findmypast.co.uk)
She was the eldest child of William Chalmers (b 1730), collector of customs in Shetland, Scotland, and his wife Katherine (Kitty) Irvine (b 1734). They had married in Lerwick, Shetland, on 20 Mar. 1758 and Margaret was baptised on 12 Dec. of the same year. She had two younger sisters and a brother, William, who was baptised on 18 Aug. 1760. Her father, who had served as chamberlain first to Lord Morton of Shetland and then to his successor, Sir Laurence Dundas, had died by 21 Oct. 1805. On that date her brother William, master of HMS Royal Sovereign under the command of Lord Collingwood, was killed at the Battle of Trafalgar. Katherine was awarded an annuity of £20 in recognition of her son’s service and the family received a yearly allowance of £30 from the Patriotic Fund. A letter written to the RLF in support of Margaret Chalmers’s 1816 application for relief, describes how Katherine had become blind and bedridden for years before her death. By 1816 one of the three sisters had died (prompting a one-third reduction in the Patriotic Fund allowance) and another was chronically ill, leaving Chalmers as the sole support for the family. She struggled to pay her father’s debts and establish some financial security. She published at least one poem in the Scots Magazine in 1810 before her book, Poems, was issued by subscription. It includes an impressive six pages of subscribers’ names in double columns. In 1814 Chalmers wrote to Walter Scott (q.v.) explaining that the book was to have been published in Edinburgh but was transferred to Newcastle. A delay in publication meant “the loss of a very numerous proportion of the subscribers which defeated her hopes.” In 1816 she applied to the RLF and was awarded £10. Nothing more is known of her life. She died, unmarried, on 10 Mar. 1827 in Lerwick. Her poems say little about the difficulties she faced and are descriptive of scenery and life in Shetland. Her book is in the Abbotsford library with a manuscript copy of her verses on Scott’s Lady of the Lake bound in. (ancestry.co.uk 4 Jan. 2024; E. L. Ewan, R. Pipes, S. Reynolds, S. Innes, The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women [2006]; findmypast.co.uk 4 Jan. 2024; RLF file 345; NLS MS 870, ff. 106-08; NLS MS 3885, f. 148; NLS MS 3886, ff. 31-32) SR