Author: Colling, Mary Maria
Biography:
COLLING, Mary Maria (1804-1853: ODNB)
Colling was a protégée of Anna Eliza Bray, a novelist and the wife of the Rev. Edward Atkyns Bray (q.v.), vicar of Tavistock, Devon. Bray’s letters to Southey (q.v.) about Colling are printed in Fables and Other Pieces in Verse and remain important sources for her biography. She was the eldest child of Edmund Colling (1769-1855), a husbandman, and Ann Philp (d 1852), who had married on 2 Oct. 1803 in St. Eustachius church, Tavistock. (ODNB gives her mother’s name as Anne Domville but she was Colling’s maternal grandmother.) Mary Maria was born on 20 Aug. in Tavistock and her baptism was recorded in the non-conformist register on 2 Sept. 1804. She was educated at the local dame school and the free school where she learned needlework. Colling subsequently taught her father to read. At age 14 she became a servant to General John Hughes and his wife. Colling began to write what she called verse fables and Bray, who met her in about 1830, sent two of them to Southey with an account of her life. Her book was published by subscription; subscribers included Samuel Rogers, Southey, and Wordsworth (qq.v.). Southey wrote the favourable review published in QR. Colling is recorded in the 1841 Census as the housekeeper for Francis Annesley Hughes, a solicitor, in Matthew Street, Tavistock; he was the son of John Hughes and his wife. When Hughes died in 1844 his will named his “truly worthy housekeeper” as one of his three executors. Colling also inherited the leasehold and contents of his house and thus found herself unexpectedly well provided for. Daniel Pring Alford, vicar of Tavistock 1869-78, recorded that she later spent time in an asylum probably in Cornwall although no other documentation for this has been located. In 1851 she was in Tavistock and living with her parents on Ford Street. She died on 6 Aug. and was buried in the Dolvin Road cemetery on 11 Aug. 1853. Colling left a will which directed her executor, solicitor Henry Cornish, to sell her real estate and distribute the proceeds first to her father and, on his death, among her siblings and to a son and daughter of her brother, William. The will was proved on 13 Sept. 1853. (ODNB 14 Jan. 2024; Orlando; ancestry.co.uk 14 Jan. 2024; QR 47 [1832], 81-103; West Country Poets; Goodridge) SR